There’s that old saying attributed to one of America’s Founding Fathers, Franklin, I think (Editor’s note: Dude, it was fucking Mark Twain) that says something like, “Sorry for the long letter, I didn’t have time to write a short one.” As far as writing goes, that is very often a True Story. It takes a hell of a lot of writing skill to distill information down to a few words while still evoking whole pictures of detail in the reader’s mind. More than I’ve got, for sure. Good songwriters can do this; good screenwriters absolutely must be able to function with an economy of words. But still, there’s a case to be made for long form writing that takes its time and revels in the details. And Neal Stephenson is the kind of author who makes that case.

Seriously, Neal, what's with the goatee?

Yes, Neal has a new book fresh out that I’m just wading into, but what I want to talk about is his last work, the 2700+ page masterpiece of historical science fiction known as The Baroque Cycle. What was so excellent about this series to me, behind all the humor and adventure and labyrinthine plotting, was the way Stephenson used the length of his books to his advantage, slowly doling out hints and details to build anticipation, to the point that when something major did happen, I was on the edge of seat reading it, even if the something were a simple conversation between two characters.

Think of the excellent scene in The Dark Knight where Batman and The Joker finally meet. Now imagine that The Dark Knight was not a movie, but a TV series, and that this epic meeting only took place after three seasons worth of build up. That’s the feeling you get in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle when it comes to the mercurial character known as Enoch Root.

Enoch, aka Enoch the Red (in a nod to another author who knew how to tell a story [unlike you, Peter Jackson! Fucker!]) is a member of the fictional Societas Eruditorum, whose motto: Ignoti et Quasi Occulti is said to translate to “unknown and partially hidden.” It is these qualities, behind everything else, that give Stephenson the tools he needs to focus the readers’ attentions where we wants them.

Long!

Book one of the series, Quicksilver, begins with Enoch the Red in early 18th century Massachusetts witnessing a witch-burning. This scene, which transitions to a flashback some 60 years earlier, gives many details about the unnaturally well-preserved Enoch whilst being tantalizingly devoid of context. We won’t see Enoch again for a great many pages. Then he pops up in the past, perplexing as ever, and disappears again. Though the story largely concerns other characters, Enoch Root’s brief but memorable contacts with them, a sort of artifex ex machina, are so effective because they’re so few and far between.

No Counterforce post is complete without a Louis XIV portrait

What Stephenson is doing in the Baroque Cycle is using the length of his writing, a seeming weaknessor indulgence, to create tension, humor and drama that you just don’t get in more modern shorter novels. He’ll throw five pages of laboriously florid locale description at the reader all to set up one really great crude joke. The payoff wouldn’t near as good if he wrote it short. Enoch will vanish from the plot for hundreds of pages, and then pop up out of nowhere to have a stunning philosophical debate with the main character, or give just the needed assist to another to further the plot. If Enoch was doing this every 20 pages, it would be annoying, but space it out to 200 and his every move rivets the reader.

Totally pwned Leibniz

The anticipation that’s been built around Enoch, and the meetings of other heavy hitters like Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, left me hanging on every word of the conversation. And these are meta-physical conversations about science and math! The reader, me — who used to be smart but then went to liberal arts college — is hashing over every line because Stephenson’s manufactured suspense, through mysterious details included and excluded, has made the intellectual debate, not the action, to be the climax of his tale.

It takes a special kind of author to con us into caring about science and math, and if you’re willing to tackle his tomes, Stephenson will drag you kicking and screaming into a better understanding of our world. And now, how about a little excerpt from Quicksilver. Here we find the lead character, Daniel Waterhouse, ruminating on the struggle between science and old ways of thinking. Waterhouse describes a shipwreck in five acts, with Act I being a ship in calm seas and Act V being wreckage and flotsam in a raging storm. This is basically Neal Stephenson in a nutshell:

“The human race has, actually, been in Act V for most of history and has recently accomplished the miraculous feet of assembling splintered planks afloat on a stormy sea into a sailing-ship and then, having climbed on board it, building instruments with which to measure the world, and then finding a kind of regularity in those measurements. When they were at Cambridge, Newton was surrounded by a personal nimbus of Act II and was well on his way to Act I.

“But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true — that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place — that men had made a reasonably trouble-free move from the Garden of Eden to the Athens of Plato and Aristotle, stopping over in the holy land to encrypt the secrets of the Universe in the pages of the Bible, and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since.”